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Change EC2 Instances Action

For those of you who don’t know, Amazon Web Services allows you to change the EC2 instance type of your EC2 instances. This means that you can change your existing t2.micro to an m4.large if you want. This change can be accomplished using the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or any of the AWS SDKs.

For many years, Skeddly has included the “Change EC2 Instance Type” action to automate this process. It’s a great way to lower your AWS costs, while keeping your EC2 instances available 24 hours a day. Many of our customers have had great success at lowering their AWS costs by changing the instance type of their EC2 instances at key times of the day or week.

Starting today, you are now able to reduce your AWS costs the same way but with an easier workflow.

Change EC2 Instances Action

A new action is now available to help you lower your costs: Change EC2 instances.

This new action allows you to select multiple EC2 instances and modify them:

Change the instance type (t2.micro, m4.large, etc.)

Change the EBS Optimized flag on the instance

Enable or disable Termination Protection on the instance

When using the older “Change EC2 Instance Type”, you needed to specify the EC2 instance ID of your instance or it’s name. If you wanted to change multiple EC2 instances, then you needed to create multiple actions.

The new action can modify many instances at the same time. Instances can be selected by:

All EC2 instances

By Instance ID

By Instance Name

By Resource Tag

For example, when selecting EC2 instances by resource tags, you can then add EC2 instances into your schedule simply by adding the appropriate tags to your EC2 instances. The next time the action executes, the new EC2 instances will be included. You no longer need to manually configure your new EC2 instances in Skeddly. This works great for automation tools, DevOps processes, and CloudFormation templates.

Use-Cases

On a daily schedule, Monday to Friday, you can change your EC2 instances from “t2.micro” to “m4.xlarge” with EBS Optimization on. Then, in the evening, switch the EC2 instances back to “t2.micro” with EBS Optimization off.

On a daily schedule, you can turn on Termination Protection on all EC2 instances that don’t have it enabled. Many times, users forget to enable Termination Protection on fresh EC2 instances. This action can be used as a safety net to ensure Termination Protection is enabled on new EC2 instances. And since you only pay for EC2 instances that are changed, you’d only pay for EC2 instances that were changed from disabled to enabled. This makes this action cost next to nothing.

This new action is available today. Full pricing for this action can be found on our pricing page.